It was a memorable night this one of which I am chronicling a trivial recollection—trivial in itself, but weighty in its consequences.
It was the 14th of January, 1858.
We went to bed, and slept, no doubt, soundly. None the less soundly for the thundering crash that, before we lay down, had shaken the Rue Lepelletier from end to end, making the houses rock to their foundations, shattering to pieces every window from garret to cellar, and reverberating along the boulevards like the roar of a hundred cannon. The noise shook half Paris awake for that long night. The people, first merely terrified, then lashed to a frenzy of horror and of enthusiasm, rushed from their houses, and thronged the boulevards and the streets in the vicinity of the Opera. In the pitch darkness that followed simultaneously with the bursting of Orsini's bombs, it was impossible to know how many were murdered or how many wounded. There had been a great crowd of curieux and strangers as usual waiting to see their majesties alight—the street was lined with them. Were they all murdered, blown to the four winds of heaven, in that explosion that was loud enough to have blown up half Paris? Of course, popular fear and fury exaggerated the number of the victims enormously, and the night resounded with the shrieks and lamentations of women, the plunging and moaning of horses, wounded or only frantic with terror, and the passionate cries of Vive l'Empereur! intermingled with curses on the fiends who, to secure the murder of one man, had sacrificed the lives of hundreds.
While this ghastly tumult was scaring sleep and silence from the city close to us, we slept on, all unconscious of the cup of trembling to which we had stretched out our hand, and which had been so mercifully snatched away from us.
It was only next morning, on going out to Mass, that the concierge stopped us to tell the news of the attempt on the Emperor's life.
And we had been vexed and felt aggrieved with the rain that drove us home, and prevented our going to stand amongst those curieux in the Rue Lepelletier!
Mary did not hear of it till we met at breakfast. I never shall forget the look of blank horror on her face as she listened to the account of what had happened on the very spot where we had been so bent on going.
Although this attack of Orsini's comes into my narrative simply as a datum, I cannot resist making a short digression toward it.
Most of my readers will remember the singular stoicism displayed by the Emperor at the moment of the explosion. One of the horses was killed under his carriage, which was violently shaken by the plunging of the terrified animals, and a splinter from one of the bombs, flashing through the window, grazed him on the temple. In the midst of the general panic and confusion of the scene, the equerry rushed forward, and, taking the Emperor by the arm, cried hurriedly:
"Come out, sire! Come out!"